Video: At Ars Technica Live, Gary Whitta told us about his career as a Hollywood writer.

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This episode of Ars Technica Live was filmed by Chris Schodt and produced by Justin Wolfson.

Rarely do you get to sit down with one of the writers of a blockbuster movie and ask, "So, what were you guys thinking when you wrote this?" But that's what Ars editor Cyrus Farivar and I (and a bunch of Ars readers) got to do last week at Ars Technica Live with our guest Gary Whitta. He's best known as the co-author of Star Wars: Rogue One, but that's just one part of a fascinating career full of highs and lows.

Whitta told us how he got started by writing about video games for a living, eventually becoming the editor-in-chief of PC Gamer magazine. He moved from the UK to the US to expand his writing portfolio just when the tech industry went bust in the early '00s, killing the company he worked for. So he decided to try a different path. He'd saved up enough money to take some time to work on screenplays, and he figured it was time to take the plunge. It took about a year of writing better and better screenplays before he was able to get a manager, but then he started selling his work. Of course, as he told us in hilarious detail, just because you sell something doesn't mean it will get made.

And even if a movie does get made, that doesn't mean you've made it. Whitta wrote The Book of Eli, which got mixed reviews (you either hated it or loved it), and he felt pretty good. But then he co-wrote After Earth with M. Night Shyamalan, which tanked horribly. Critics absolutely lambasted it and made fun of Jaden Smith's performance. Gary thought his career was over, and he started mentally preparing to do other things. He focused on writing video games and published a novel.

Then, out of nowhere, his manager told Whitta that Lucasfilm wanted to take a meeting with him. He told us that he honestly had no idea what they wanted. Maybe advice on a video game? Maybe feedback on something related to fandom, because he was a lifelong fan of the franchise? The meeting itself was even more mysterious. The Lucasfilm people just asked him to talk about why he loves Star Wars. He must have impressed them because they followed up by sending him an encrypted PDF that turned out to be the early treatment for Rogue One.

You'll have to watch the video above to get the full scoop on what it was like to work on Rogue One as well as Star Wars: Rebels. It was fascinating to learn more about what it's like to be a creator working inside somebody else's world, and how Lucasfilm keeps all its properties in continuity. He also told us about the process of writing in Hollywood generally and answered a lot of great questions from the audience.

Ars Technica Live is a monthly series filmed live at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland, CA. Join us next month on November 15 for another episode. You can also follow Ars Technica Live on Facebook.

"What were they thinking" has such negative connotations for a film I thought was downright fantastic.

Let's compare prequels

Rogue One vs A Phantom Menace

I get to introduce my girlfriend to Star wars

my new sequence is Rogue One and then New Hope, then Empire strikes back and Return of the Jedi, Not sure where I put attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith in there but then The force awakens.

Rogue One segueways into a New Hope nicely even if the CGI towards the end is just a bit off. and answers a question from a new hope. why didn't they receive the broadcast? Because it was hand delivered.

Rogue One was really enjoyable for the same reason The Magnificent Seven (original) was. It was based on an excellent source, that being The Seven Samurai. Then it was frosted with delicious Star Wars frosting.As the man is a lover of the franchise it may have been a homage to Lucas's use of The Hidden Fortress for the original SW.

Guys, we've been running video on Ars for years, and we've been down this road before. There are some things we feel are better presented via video, and this is one of those things. Those things won't get transcripts, which are extremely time-consuming to produce. If you don't like videos on Ars, don't watch them. Bitching about the existence of a video without a transcript or lengthy attached article when we post one isn't going to be very productive to you. The number of views we get on these shows very, very clearly that a large number of the readers find the videos interesting enough to watch them.

Further comments along these lines in this discussion thread will be treated as off-topic posts and will be moderated accordingly and may result in official warnings and/or bans.

"What were they thinking" has such negative connotations for a film I thought was downright fantastic.

Let's compare prequels

Rogue One vs A Phantom Menace

I get to introduce my girlfriend to Star wars

my new sequence is Rogue One and then New Hope, then Empire strikes back and Return of the Jedi, Not sure where I put attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith in there but then The force awakens.

Rogue One segueways into a New Hope nicely even if the CGI towards the end is just a bit off. and answers a question from a new hope. why didn't they receive the broadcast? Because it was hand delivered.

your sequence for maximum impact and to retain all of the content should be IV, V, I, II, III, VI, VII, VIII, IX. This allows you to experience the rise of Luke and just when Vader says, "I am your father" you jump to Anakin's rise (technically you could skip Ep I but it does have one of the best Light Saber duels of all time) as a Jedi and his fall to the Sith. At which point you leap forward to his redemption and then move on in canonical order.

This is known as the Rist order and if you want to look up why it works best it's out there

"What were they thinking" has such negative connotations for a film I thought was downright fantastic.

Let's compare prequels

Rogue One vs A Phantom Menace

I get to introduce my girlfriend to Star wars

my new sequence is Rogue One and then New Hope, then Empire strikes back and Return of the Jedi, Not sure where I put attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith in there but then The force awakens.

Rogue One *segueways* into a New Hope nicely even if the CGI towards the end is just a bit off. and answers a question from a new hope. why didn't they receive the broadcast? Because it was hand delivered.

Guys, we've been running video on Ars for years, and we've been down this road before. There are some things we feel are better presented via video, and this is one of those things. Those things won't get transcripts, which are extremely time-consuming to produce. If you don't like videos on Ars, don't watch them. Bitching about the existence of a video without a transcript or lengthy attached article when we post one isn't going to be very productive to you. The number of views we get on these shows very, very clearly that a large number of the readers find the videos interesting enough to watch them.

Further comments along these lines in this discussion thread will be treated as off-topic posts and will be moderated accordingly and may result in official warnings and/or bans.

What a shitty way to treat your readers. Hell I wasn't bitching for a transcript but maybe a summation of the video if you're going to title it like you did.

Guys, we've been running video on Ars for years, and we've been down this road before. There are some things we feel are better presented via video, and this is one of those things. Those things won't get transcripts, which are extremely time-consuming to produce. If you don't like videos on Ars, don't watch them. Bitching about the existence of a video without a transcript or lengthy attached article when we post one isn't going to be very productive to you. The number of views we get on these shows very, very clearly that a large number of the readers find the videos interesting enough to watch them.

Further comments along these lines in this discussion thread will be treated as off-topic posts and will be moderated accordingly and may result in official warnings and/or bans.

What a shitty way to treat your readers. Hell I wasn't bitching for a transcript but maybe a summation of the video if you're going to title it like you did.

You have to wonder why they're being so defensive about this. I think this is the quickest we've seen a moderation warning of any article, at least in my time reading Ars. Must have touched a nerve.

How about just putting (VIDEO) in the title so those unwilling or unable to watch a video know before they click in? I think that would address the frustration of clicking something expecting to read an article.

Edit: The subheading does say Video, not sure if that was there the whole time. So there's that.

I thought I recognized the name Gary Whitta, as a long-time PC Gamer subscriber. His tenure as Editor-in-chief was one of the high points of what was a must-read magazine for gamers back in the early internet days, in my opinion. Had no idea he wrote screenplays, let alone some great ones!

Kinda funny how they will moderate the hell out people for requesting a transcript or article that actually has content, but they take their sweet time doing anything about people who post political claptrap (on both sides of the aisle).

Definitely hit a nerve.

Editor Moonshark says:

Kinda funny how long-time posters who should really know better post stuff in a discussion thread that they have been explicitly directed not to. We don't have that problem on the moon, because my moonshark brethren take site issues to the Feedback Forum.

Surely there is a writer somewhere at Ars that could draft up a short article including the highlights of this video...including the thoughts hinted in the headline many clicked on to get here.

You mean like the short article that is literally this post?

The article as-is talks about Gary Whitta’s past accomplishments and about how he got the job for Rogue One, but nothing involving his work on the film and Rebels, which the final paragraph suggests is the majority of the video. While I appreciate the existing summary, I think a number of us were hoping for a text summary highlighting Whitta’s thoughts after he got the job. We would be very thankful if you were to add it.

The subheading does say Video, not sure if that was there the whole time. So there's that.

It doesn't matter, people will complain no matter what. We're tired of it, so yeah, it's time to start moderating it and getting on it quicker.

No one likes to go through the effort of running a live event for people, securing a cool nerdy special guest, and then taking the extra effort of videoing it so that everyone who couldn't make it to the event can also see what went down only to find that the comments are full of complaints from people who are mad you didn't spend hours transcribing it all too.

It's the right medium for what happened, it's a live talk, and you can check it out or not as you see fit.

In the future, I do not know if this would work but I have at least one friend who throws his phone on the table for board and mgmt meetings with IIRC Google translate(?) running, then he just scrapes the text off of it after meetings. I'm not sure if that idea will help in the future. grab it with phone, dump it to PC, spell check it, .. and maybe give the results a quick read through to make sure the spell checked results are not too hilariously wrong. It might be a few minutes work to give the unhappy people what they are looking for?

I entirely understand why full transcripts are not posted and hate to add to the meta-discussion here but I think most of the moderated posters are making a good point that Ars staff should consider.

The reason I opened this article was to read Gary's thoughts about Rogue One. The reason I expected this was because the article's title says 'now we know what the writers were thinking about Rogue One'. However the article itself doesn't mention anything at all on Gary's thoughts about Rogue One. Thus I can see why some people are feeling like this otherwise interesting article is clickbait. I love Ars and have been reading it for 15+ years so I'm not trying to troll anyone - this is the first time I can recall being so unsatisfied with the content of an Ars story given the headline.

I think having the article itself more closely match the headline would make more sense? I don't think a full transcript is at all needed. A single paragraph summarizing the major rogue one takeaways would be enough? I think then if I wanted to know the details I could watch the video later and Ars staff would not have a bunch of extra work to do?

[quote="[url=https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=34233447#p34233447]]I'm not sure if that idea will help in the future. grab it with phone, dump it to PC, spell check it, .. and maybe give the results a quick read through to make sure the spell checked results are not too hilariously wrong. [/quote]

Punctuation, punctuation, punctuation. It isn't just a spell check, or a quick read through to make sure that the actual topic was captured. It has to be readable beyond just scavenging data.

With a multi-speaker video you have to:

1. Separate the text out by the individual speakers (Bob said: blah, blah blah.)2. Insert punctuation.3. Check for readability.4. Edit out objectionable language (acceptable in video not so much in print sometimes).5. Make sure you note unfinished thoughts or missing spoken language cues6. Discover all the blank spaces that your recording of a recording dropped and go back to the video and hand transcribe).

It isn't minutes of work, it isn't even hours of work it is days of work. I know this is what I do for a living (film/video editing is part of my daily) it is tedious, boring and easy to muck up.

Holy shit. Was going to comment on the article, but goddamn do I feel the need to comment on what the Ars staff has done and said in these comments.

First of all, it's really fucking shitty to ban people for "trolling" when they're voicing legitimate concerns. That you told them to stuff it a few minutes before doesn't turn it into trolling, and using that label to silence your critics just screams bad faith.

Yeah, I know it's annoying. Users suck, and we have unreasonable demands. But you really think banning discussion of things people don't like about an article is a good way to handle that?

As far as the cost associated with transcription, sure, fair point. That's why you don't have your high paid journalists doing it, you pay some random asshole on Mechanical Turk to do it for $25 (of course, if your profit from this article is relatively close to $25, that doesn't work). Perfection isn't paramount, nobody's going to be at risk of anything if your low-paid transcriber messes up attribution of a comment or punctuation. Hell, I'm sure some of your readers would be willing to do it if you put out the call, and would do a fantastic job. Just open up a forum for videos that have been posted, first N people to post good transcripts get a free month of Ars Premier.

Honestly, you guys came off like you just can't handle criticism, especially with so many staff members piling on commenters like you are here. Maybe take a look at the voting on the posts to see that basically everyone thinks you're in the wrong here. It's your site, and you can run it how you want, but if every one of your readers thinks you're acting shitty, then that's something you should probably deal with.

In response to the above moderation note, I strongly disagree with this sentiment.

Quote:

This is why you do not argue Moderation in-thread. It always detracts from the main focus of the topic. If you really feel your voice needs to be heard on Moderation issues, either Report the Moderation post (which will go to ModMail, where ALL moderation staff can see it), or take it to the Help and Feedback forum.

Discussing it here is a great way for grievances to be heard, and is absolutely useful. Private communications channels directly to you guys for grievance reporting is a fine idea, but when you've got what looks like four different staff members behaving as they are in this article, moderating people for "trolling" for voicing their concerns, there's a bit of a credibility problem. Why on earth would I believe the people condescending to us in this thread are suddenly going to take the issue seriously once it's been made completely private and their response can't be seen or judged by the people who found it objectionable?

Quote:

Disrupting the main discussion is never useful.

This statement is simply false. Disruption is one of the few things that ever gets the attention of the people higher up, and it sure as hell did the trick here. You may disagree with the use it served, but that does not mean it served no use.

As a final note, I would advise the Ars staff to familiarize themselves with the first rule of holes before continuing with the course you've chosen here.

Punctuation, punctuation, punctuation. It isn't just a spell check, or a quick read through to make sure that the actual topic was captured. It has to be readable beyond just scavenging data.

With a multi-speaker video you have to:

1. Separate the text out by the individual speakers (Bob said: blah, blah blah.)2. Insert punctuation.3. Check for readability.4. Edit out objectionable language (acceptable in video not so much in print sometimes).5. Make sure you note unfinished thoughts or missing spoken language cues6. Discover all the blank spaces that your recording of a recording dropped and go back to the video and hand transcribe).

It isn't minutes of work, it isn't even hours of work it is days of work. I know this is what I do for a living (film/video editing is part of my daily) it is tedious, boring and easy to muck up.

Days on a 3 person 1 hours video didn't pass my sanity check.Luckily I know someone who closely manages people do this. So I asked her.They do it hot/live (She said is was called CART? or KART?) then afterwords it is a few hours of clean up for final transcript.

I kind of wondered if I had a phone dump and a notepad file with the 3 speaker's names and [audience member] (4 macros would be better) how it would take me days.. Even if I start arguing typeface with someone (While I like Caslon* for when I'm writing, I think for this I might pick Gotham).

Guys, we've been running video on Ars for years, and we've been down this road before. There are some things we feel are better presented via video, and this is one of those things. Those things won't get transcripts, which are extremely time-consuming to produce. If you don't like videos on Ars, don't watch them. Bitching about the existence of a video without a transcript or lengthy attached article when we post one isn't going to be very productive to you. The number of views we get on these shows very, very clearly that a large number of the readers find the videos interesting enough to watch them.

Further comments along these lines in this discussion thread will be treated as off-topic posts and will be moderated accordingly and may result in official warnings and/or bans.

Ban me if you want, but it is hilarious the way this post was downvoted.

Also kind of a fuckstick move to threaten to ban users for continued discussion. Oh well, your readership to lose, not mine.

Punctuation, punctuation, punctuation. It isn't just a spell check, or a quick read through to make sure that the actual topic was captured. It has to be readable beyond just scavenging data.

With a multi-speaker video you have to:

1. Separate the text out by the individual speakers (Bob said: blah, blah blah.)2. Insert punctuation.3. Check for readability.4. Edit out objectionable language (acceptable in video not so much in print sometimes).5. Make sure you note unfinished thoughts or missing spoken language cues6. Discover all the blank spaces that your recording of a recording dropped and go back to the video and hand transcribe).

It isn't minutes of work, it isn't even hours of work it is days of work. I know this is what I do for a living (film/video editing is part of my daily) it is tedious, boring and easy to muck up.

Been lurking on ars for a decade now, made an account just to comment: That is absolute bullshit. My mother to this day works as a transcriber for about 50 years now and teaches younger people the trade working for a small company in Ottawa. A transcriber worth half their wage can do a video like this in near real time. I hear services like Amazon mechanical turk offers transcription services for a few bucks per hour of audio nowadays. I can tell you it sure as hell isn't taking them a couple of days.

As per the video/article: I'm on chrome (no addons) and no matter what I do, the video won't load. Its just a black box. Youtube and other sites seem to be working fine